DanielZKlein

Nope! Win rates change over time, and especially so for new legends. She released into top 3, has been climbing since and is now the strongest legend in the game. And her win rate is still going up!

Airdrop Escalation is a limited time takeover. There are currently no plans to add it permanently to the game.

We've got something planned for her but I doubt it'll be enough. What we probably need to do is to put health into her walls as they're building, but that is a very scary change. Those of us who were around for early Rampart playtesting remember how incredibly unhealthy it was for the game to be able to throw down a wall midfight, have instant cover to heal/reload behind, and possibly also make your enemy waste like a full Mastiff shot on a wall. There's ways of avoiding that while also making the walls stronger but we're moving carefully.

(My current preferred pitch would be either give the wall health as it's building, but let that health tick up gradually, so you can still destroy it if you focus it, or else give the wall health as it's building but allow bullets to pass through while it's building--in that version the wall would still come up as long as it doesn't take full damage, but it wouldn't protect you until it's built. Version 2 would require a lot of visual sup...

Love the idea of a toggle for fences. Not sure how much it'll actually show up in play in terms of when do situations where this would be useful manifest, but even if it's a once every 20 games thing it could still be super cool.

Picking up ult and gaining shield passively are both okay in terms of making the character clearly more attractive selfishly, but the problem is that Wattson has a very high winrate; one that climbs aggressively with skill as well. Right now she's barely seen, even at the highest level, and even in comp she's fallen off from her near-100% pick rate peak, but it doesn't take very much to push an already strong character from "never seen" to "everywhere and a pain in the butt".

Right now the winrate top 5 breaks down as Horizon > Wraith > Gibby > Lifeline > Wattson. If we put meaningful power into Wattson it's quite likely we'd make a not-so-fun to play character a must pick for people trying to win. That's not great.

Power do...

And to be clear, I'm not saying wallrunning is bad; I'm saying wallrunning is a bad fit for Apex Legends. Eventually we'll make other games in the future (nothing being worked on at the moment I'm afraid) and I wouldn't be surprised if a game that's less PvP focused could bring the amazing movement model of TF2 back. Like if there ever is a TF3, for instance. It's just not a good fit for Apex, a game where good positioning matters, where getting the drop on an enemy matters, where differences in loadout matter. If you bust open the skill ceiling and set it to "outer space" (which is what wall running effectively does) then all of these things will become irrelevant compared to "is my opponent a lot better than me at the movement model? If so, I'm screwed no matter what else." That just doesn't fit into the kind of game Apex is.

Haha :D I did a long ass post once upon a time why we'll never introduce wall running to Apex. Go dig through my history and find it if you're curious!

We should hire this guy.

Oh wait we did :D

We tested this! It did not go well. Fun fact: there is such a thing as too much bamboozling.

(People were getting ambushed by invisible loot box Mirages when it worked; 99% of the time it did nothing and was just confusing to the Mirage)

Somewhere in the universe, an environment artist just cried out in pain.

Yeah! His playstyle is what we call sharp: as in, success and failure are keenly felt, and when his tactical and ultimate work, they work so well they make the enemy MORE frustrated than they make Rev & his team happy. That's a dangerous pattern. He absolutely should be getting buffs, but we didn't have the time to find the right buffs.

So two thoughts about Rampart's passive:

• Having it be specific to LMGs is a good thing. It makes you think differently about what weapons you wanna pick up in a game. LMGs are a sucky weapon class atm, but that's fine too; a character who'd get a weapon class specific buff on ARs or SMGs would be broken.

• Finding the right tuning on it isn't easy. There's a tuning level where we make it so strong that it becomes mandatory to find and play with an LMG on Rampart, which I think would be sad. I think there's room for a little more power in there, but it'll never be a character defining passive.

I mean, I'm quite mad, but cactopus is posting in this very thread and he seems fine ;P

That's how she's designed! Both her wall and her gun are hardcoded to go down with two grenade hits. It's the intended counterplay.

It's absolutely fair to discuss and criticize and call out our actions. It is not ever acceptable to deliver this feedback in the form of personal insults and threats, and there should be no expectation that people will show up personally here to be yelled at. That's my point.

He said it's much worse but some of it is deserved. I pointed out that none of it is ever deserved.

Literally none of it is deserved. That was the whole point of my post.

I've not spent much time thinking about this but no-fill in duos/trios might give you some of what you want. Sure you'll be going up against squads, but you'll be able to fend for yourself at least.

I fundamentally don't think the combat in Apex holds up for 1000s of hours as a solo game. It's built around the pacing of 3 people fighting 3 other people, with all the knock downs, revives, and respawns that comes with that.

Just to jump on that last point: NO ONE should be idolizing us. I'm seeing that too and it's just as wrong as assuming we're evil villains out to ruin your day / steal your money. It turns out devs are people; people who make mistakes, who sometimes have an off day, people who just want to put in their 8 hours of work a day and be able to pay rent and put food on the table for their family. It's not healthy to form a parasocial relationship with the people who make the games you like over some posts on social media. Absolutely do geek out with us and talk about the games we make! But don't put us on a pedestal or whatever the opposite of a pedestal is. At the end of the day we're just nerds who put stuff into an IntelliJ window hoping not to break the game ;P

I'm very happy to discuss the things I do work on! At the moment that's mostly balance changes to Legends, smaller reworks, and at some point in the medium future there'll be a Legend I worked on.

I've seen it too, highly motivated and talented devs leaving for a variety of reasons, often entirely preventable. I think a lot comes down to both creating an environment devs feel happy in and also making sure there's proper career advancement paths for them. It sucks that in our industry, the quickest way to get promoted is to switch companies, to the point where the "leave and come back" strategy is common enough we have a name for it.